What’s hot and what’s not in 2010?

As the new decade looms large on the horizon, here are a few of the movies we at Movie Talk are talking about. Some because we can’t wait to get our bums on the seat of our local movie theatre and lap up what promises to be a great cinematic experience… And others because we’re expecting them to be so excruciating we’ll want to give them a very wide berth indeed.

Don’t forget to pop back later in the year to find out whether we’ve got a great big grin on our faces… or enough egg to make an omelette.

Heidi’s Hotties:

Irish director Jim Sheridan is a personal favourite of mine because his movies are always moving, character-led stories. So there’s no way I’m likely to miss his latest movie Brothers, but what intrigues me even more is the casting, because I’ve always felt that Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal bear an uncanny resemblance to each other, so casting them as brothers – one the good brother who goes to fight in Afghanistan, is reported dead then turns up alive but traumatised, the other the bad brother with a criminal record who is left behind to comfort his brother’s wife Natalie Portman (uh-oh, that sounds like a recipe for disaster) – is frankly inspired. And the story’s pretty intriguing too…

Just about everyone and his mate have read Alice Sebold’s hauntingly beautiful bestseller — about a murdered girl watching over her family and her killer from Heaven — so it’s no big surprise that the film adaptation is eagerly awaited. That said, we all know Hollywood is notorious for screwing these things up (Bonfire of the Vanities RIP), but hiring director Peter Jackson is surely a very good omen.. Yup, I’m one of those people who thought that what Jackson did with The Lord of the Rings trilogy was truly inspired (the 23 endings in Return of the King notwithstanding!), so I’ve got high hopes for Sebold’s deeply affecting novel being turned into an equally affecting movie. Fingers crossed.

To activate the sound in the trailer: hold your cursor over the screen to reveal the control panel and click on the volume control in the bottom right-hand corner.

Okay, I admit it, I’m a Pixar junkie. Pretty much every one of their films is a triumph of story-telling talent and state-of-the-art CGI animation and unlike other studios (Dreamworks are you listening?) they respect their audience and don’t do throw-away, jump-on-the-bandwagon sequels. They spent as much time and effort on both Toy Story 2 & 3 as they did on the original film. That showed with Toy Story 2… So I’m expecting the same with 3, and the teaser trailers look very promising. They’ve been typically tight-lipped about the plot, something about Andy going to college and the toys getting accidentally tossed into a dustbin lorry. But if rumours of Michael Keaton as Barbie’s Ken with an inferiority complex are true, this movie just got a whole lot hotter IMHO.

To activate the sound in the trailer: hold your cursor over the screen to reveal the control panel and click on the volume control in the bottom right-hand corner.

Heidi’s Nottie:

I’m not a big fan of sequels generally, because apart from Toy Story 2 (see above) and The Godfather Part Two, they almost always disappoint. And as I’m one of those people who failed to catch the wave when the TV series aired (maybe I just don’t buy enough designer shoes) and thought the movie was just a tad irritating (let’s face it Carrie, all the long faces and self-pity after Big left you at the altar got boring after a while) so I’m in no big hurry to fork out another eight quid to see these four angst about shoes and men and, well, more shoes and men, for another two plus hours. But maybe that’s just me??

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